“Alice and Steve,” a marvelous six-part British comedy coming Monday to Hulu, gives us Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement as the titular longtime best friends whose lives are turned inside out when Steve begins dating Alice’s daughter, Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). She’s 26, and he’s “a 50-year-old man, and that’s when I’m rounding down.”
Creator Sophie Goodhart (“Sex Education”) builds her story on themes of youth and age, love and friendship. Steve is a celebrity stylist — don’t call him a hairdresser — who created the “Nicole Richie bob.” Alice (Walker, known here for “Spooks”), is a clothing designer, married to Daniel (Joel Fry), a music teacher. Their son, Dom (Tyrese Eaton-Dyce), is taken with Rome (Eilidh Fisher), whom he’ll scare off with a premature declaration of love — not that that’s the end of that. Daniel has a flirty colleague, Marni (Lydia Wilson), who would like him to let his hair down.
In the aftermath of a funeral, Alice and Steve go to a club filled with young people and attempt to party like it’s 1995, or whatever year they met at the Hacienda (a famous Manchester venue) with Steve’s beloved French bulldog (I think) and a 20-year-old bag of cocaine in tow. Alice will encourage Steve, who is divorced and lonely, to try his luck with the room’s young women, which will not go well, and at the end of their long night, and an emergency trip to the vet, Izzy, who has come home having just broken up with her boyfriend, finds Steve sleeping on her mother’s couch. They talk. “I hadn’t noticed before, but you are weirdly hot,” she says. One thing leads to another.
For purposes of the story and for the benefit of the viewer who might otherwise feel a little, you know, dirty, it’s Izzy who drives this scene. (In late-period Cary Grant movies, when he was paired with much younger women, he was never the aggressor, and those films live on.) But Steve is enough of a child, and Izzy enough of an adult, as she will repeatedly point out, that the pairing seems … not impossible, or particularly unseemly — nothing to dismiss out of hand. It’s presented without winks or nudges, neither as a joke nor necessarily foolish.
This doesn’t work for Alice, however, who goes from disbelief to sabotage to an act of betrayal whose wreckage spills out over the series and blows back on her. Walker makes a magnificent wreck, though she is brilliant in every mood. (Anger, sadness, hopefulness; it can get pretty dark.) In one lovely scene, rescuing Dom from a party, she talks a roomful of high teenagers down from a cliff of despair, summoning a matter-of-fact, motherly energy, followed by a superbly executed heart to heart with Rome on the banks of the Thames. Clement, so exquisitely low-key in “Flight of the Conchords,” ramps up that energy just a few clicks for a character defined in part by his passivity. (That the actor is in his 50s seems impossible, but the figures don’t lie. And he is weirdly sexy.)
Directed by Tom Kingsley (the UK “Ghosts”), the series has a naturalism I think of as particularly British, that grounds whatever is outlandish in the plot. Because Goodhart takes her characters seriously — because she likes them, clearly — and because the actors sit so well in them, one is genuinely concerned for their fates. (When I say “one,” I of course mean “me and maybe you.”) And because she doesn’t really play favorites — everyone makes mistakes, everyone deserves love — the series remains unpredictable. Not that it lacks a plan: Retrospectively, you can trace back the breadcrumbs that led toward a conclusion, of sorts — but I can say no more.
